“When you promote your app, you should avoid using services that advertise or guarantee top placement in App Store charts. Even if you are not personally engaged in manipulating App Store chart rankings or user reviews, employing services that do so on your behalf may result in the loss of your Apple Developer Program membership,” the warning from Apple reads.

The warning came in response to a growing number of claims that shady marketing practices and purpose-driven technologies are falsely inflating app store rankings via erroneous, repetitive download schemes.

In order to maintain the integrity of the App Store and its ranking system, Apple says it will clean house and not hesitate to remove anyone who tinkers with the legitimate established processes that determine an app’s rightful ranking in the App Store.

Ben A. Reitzes of Barclays Capital says that if Apple releases a device costing no more than $1,500, Apple could immediately claim roughly 5% of he HDTV market.

In doing so, Apple would generate first year product revenue of approximately $17 billion.

“Apple’s eventual television could be so much more than a TV — including gaming, video, communication, content delivery, apps, computing and all the capabilities of the current Apple TV — it is not really fair to compare it to products already available on the market,” Reitzes said Tuesday.

“It appears more and more likely that the company is actively engaging partners about a potential device and content,” he adds. “If Apple were to sell a TV, we continue to believe its margins and pricing could be industry leading given its vertical integration with content. We believe that Siri could be used as a groundbreaking interface for TV,which could be used as a content hub — glued together by iOS and iOS devices.”

Reitzes believes the long-awaited Apple HDTV will come after Apple enters fiscal 2013 this October.

Are you intrigued by the prospect of an Apple HDTV? Might it make your must-have list along with other Apple gadgets when it finally launches? Please weigh in with your two cents below.

Luckily for music lovers, the Grammy Live Mobile App is now available for the iPad, iPhone and iPod touch users.

If this announcement sounds familiar, there’s a good chance that it is. For the third year in a row, music fans worldwide will have unprecedented access to all the VIP and backstage events leading up to and throughout the 54th Annual Grammy Awards, airing Sunday, Feb. 12 at 8p.m. on CBS.

Beginning Friday – and running through Sunday – Grammy Live will feature three days of exclusive live videos, blogging, tweets and re-tweets, as well as official news reports and updates from Grammy Live hosts Alison Haislip, Drew Hinze, and John Norris.

“We’re giving music fans the ultimate Grammy experience this year through GRAMMY Live,” said Evan Greene, Chief Marketing Officer for The Recording Academy. “We connect with music in very personal ways, and through shared, social experiences, fans are more eager than ever to support and follow their favorite artists in new and exciting ways.”

“We’re excited to be partnering with The Recording Academy to bring music fans this incredible multi-platform experience,” adds Marc DeBevoise, SVP and GM of Entertainment at CBS Interactive. “By making this program available in so many ways, we’re catering to all music fans, giving them an exclusive virtual ticket to the biggest music event of the year on any device.”

Do you plan to remain engaged with your smartphone to follow all the Grammys coverage this weekend?

According to the report, there are now roughly 466,000 jobs in the so-called “App Economy” in the United States. That’s a dramatic improvement over 2007, when that number was… well, zero.

TechNet also found that these App Economy jobs are spread throughout the nation. The top metro area for App Economy jobs is New York City and its surrounding suburban counties, although together San Francisco and San Jose together substantially exceed New York.

“America’s App Economy – which had zero jobs just 5 years ago before the iPhone was introduced – demonstrates that we can quickly create economic value and jobs through cutting-edge innovation,” said Rey Ramsey, President and CEO of TechNet. “Today, the App Economy is creating jobs in every part of America, employing hundreds of thousands of U.S. workers today and even more in the years to come.”

“The App Economy, along with the broad communications sector, has been a leading source of hiring strength in an otherwise sluggish labor market,” said Dr. Michael Mandel, the report’s author and President of South Mountain Economics and former Chief Economist for BusinessWeek.

To read the full report, click here.

After a comprehensive review of fourth quarter 2011 earnings, IDC found that it is Apple – not Samsung – that claimed the top spot as the globe’s biggest smartphone maker.

Apple’s 37 million iPhone sales during the last quarter of 2011 was enough to secure top honors for the venerable Cupertino, California-based tech giant.

IDC says the top global smartphone vendors for the period are as follows: Apple, Samsung, Nokia, RIM, and HTC.

On a full-year basis, total smartphone shipment volumes reached 491.4 million units in 2011, up a strong 61.3% from the 304.7 million units in 2010. This was higher than IDC’s full year estimate of 54.7% for the year, but still below 2010′s year-over-year growth of 75.7%. Although this marks a slowdown from 2010, IDC still fully expects continued double-digit growth for the foreseeable future.

“So-called ‘hero’ devices, such as Samsung’s Galaxy Nexus and Apple’s iPhone 4S, garner the bulk of the attention heaped on the device type,” said Kevin Restivo, senior research analyst with IDC’s Worldwide Mobile Phone Tracker program. “But a growing number of sub-$250 device offerings, based on the Android operating system, have allowed Google’s hardware partners to grow smartphone volumes and expand the market concurrently.”

According to published reports in the Financial Times, Facebook could launch its mobile advertising platform in early March.

Why the rush? Facebook clearly wants to illustrate to the investment community that it has established – or is in the process of establishing – viable and highly lucrative income streams.

The writing was on the wall for this platform based on the language Facebook used in its IPO filing last week.

“We currently do not show ads or directly generate any meaningful revenue from users accessing Facebook through our mobile products, but we believe that we may have potential future monetization opportunities such as the inclusion of sponsored stories in users’ mobile News Feeds,” Facebook revealed.

As of this writing, Facebook is planning to hold a marketing-related event in New York City on February 29th. Current plans call for Facebook to raise the curtain on its mobile ad platform at that time.

According to RIM vice president of developer relations Alec Saunders, the BlackBerry App World storefront is more profitable for devs that the competing Android Market owned and operated by rival Google.

Saunders revealed this week at the BlackBerry DevCon Europe conference that BlackBerry App World sees more than 6 million app downloads every 24 hours. Saunders alleges that App World now produces 43 percent more daily downloads per mobile app than Apple’s App Store.

More interesting to the developer community, however, is Saunder’s assertion that 13 percent of RIM’s developers earn $100,000 or more annually.

BlackBerry, which only controls roughly 16 percent of the total U.S. smartphone market as of late 2011, is struggling to not only retain customers but also developers.

By trumpeting the profitability of the BlackBerry App World store, perhaps the developer community will take a fresh look at the otherwise fading smartphone platform.

According to the survey, nearly 40% of respondents used mobile devices in response to TV ads and 45% estimated that they spent 30 minutes or more on their mobile devices during the game.  Interestingly, the survey showed that almost twice as many respondents used their mobile devices during the first half of the game compared to the second half – a powerful take-away for advertisers indeed.

“Mobile is an amazing channel for reaching consumers when they are in a lean-back entertainment-oriented mindset,” explained Anne Frisbie, Vice President and Managing Director, North America, for InMobi.  “Savvy advertisers will allocate more dollars to mobile advertising, either in conjunction with TV ads or through mobile-only advertising campaigns during similar sporting events and key holiday weekends throughout the year.”  Other takeaways from the survey include:

• 39% used their mobile device in response to a TV commercial during the game by doing one or more of the following: discussing commercials, getting more information about an advertised product, or watching TV ads again.
• 30% reported using their mobile devices most during commercials.
• 27% downloaded a Super Bowl app.

“Remote patient monitoring,” Juniper says, “using the smartphone as a hub, will also lower the cost of mHealth services by reducing the need for costly tailored devices.”

The report finds that the monitoring of cardiac outpatients is currently leading the field, as insurance reimbursement in the US market plays a key role.

But Juniper estimates that in the years to come, the management of diabetes and COPD (Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disorder) and other chronic diseases will play an important role in the remote patient monitoring market.

“Remote patient monitoring will step in to reduce the cost burden of unhealthy lifestyles and aging populations,” writes report author Anthony Cox.

Other findings from the report include:

• Mobile Healthcare and medical App downloads will reach 44 million in 2012, Rising to 142 Million in 2016
• Clarification from the US FDA (Food and Drug Administration) on which mHealth apps will require FDA approval is still required but is expected to add further impetus to the market.
• Developing markets continue to benefit from SMS-based education programs and stand to benefit in medium term from app-based healthcare services such as mobile ultrasound that are now being developed
• EHR (electronic health records) have yet to gain significant traction even in developed markets but in the long term will become an important component of mHealth offerings

To learn more about Juniper’s mHealth studies and reports, click here.

And, as always, for the latest mHealth news and industry happenings, stayed tuned to mHealthWatch.com.

It also delivered a victory to food – tasty, delicious, and anything but healthy food, much of which was ordered by a mobile phone and delivered in time for the big game.

As MMW reported earlier Monday, mobile devices and corresponding social media platforms were very popular during the game, with Twitter generating more than 12,000 tweets per second during the final three minutes of the Super Bowl.

But mCommerce was also a huge success, estimates independent business analyst Mike Randazzo.

On Monday, Randazzo told Mobile Marketing Watch that the national pizza chains could report some interesting number in the days ahead.

“I would venture to guess that pizza chains saw a record number of orders placed online and via mobile devices,” he says, “possibily to a mind-blowing, record-shattering degree.”

“People were plugged into their mobile devices like never before on a day that, historically, tends to be very strong for pizza sales,” Randazzo concludes.

“This was the first year that the Super Bowl was live streamed, and there was a significant spike in searches related to Super Bowl live streaming on game day,” the Google Blog reads today. “Searches peaked at kickoff, and were made predominantly on desktop, followed by mobile phones and then tablets.”

Did you use your mobile phone to order food during yesterday’s Super Bowl? If so, please leave a comment – or some leftovers – below.